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Tag Archives: COGE

As you may know, we’ve been doing these video tips-of-the-week for FOUR years now. We have completed around 200 little tidbit introductions to various resources from last year, 2011 (yep, it’s 2012 now). At the end of the year we’ve established a sort of holiday tradition: we are doing a summary post to collect them all. If you have missed any of them it’s a great way to have a quick look at what might be useful to your work.

I did a tip on CoGe’s tool, GeVo about two years ago and we’ve had a guest post about CoGe from Eric Lyons, the lead developer of CoGe just over a year ago. In our ongoing and occasional quest to keep our tips fresh (and move them to SciVee), I’ve decided to revisit CoGe and one of their tools. CoGe has changed a bit since we last visited it (see some of the changes here). There is a new interface, more documentation and many more tutorials, some new tools and interconnections and a lot more genomes. I’m going to give a brief introduction to SynMap and going to use it to do a genome rearrangement analysis (a subject of a text tutorial at the site).

The QUOTA-ALIGN algorithm screens a set of synteny blocks to retain only those compatible with a user specified ploidy relationship between two genomes. These blocks, in turn, may be used for additional downstream analyses such as identifying true orthologous regions in interspecific comparisons.

And as mentioned, and you’ll see in this tip, “QUOTA-ALIGN program is also integrated as a major component in SynMap http://genomevolution.com/CoGe/SynMap.plwebcite, offering easier access to thousands of genomes for non-programmers.”Tang, H., Lyons, E., Pedersen, B., Schnable, J., Paterson, A., & Freeling, M. (2011). Screening synteny blocks in pairwise genome comparisons through integer programming BMC Bioinformatics, 12 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-12-102

This next post in our continuing semi-regular Guest Post series is from Eric Lyons, of CoGe at the University of California, Berkeley. If you are a provider of a free, publicly available genomics tool, database or resource and would like to convey something to users on our guest post feature, please feel free to contact us at wlathe AT openhelix DOT com.

Thanks both for the prior CoGe post (editors note: a tip of the week on GoGe) and the invitation to write a bit about CoGe. Since most people are probably not familiar with CoGe, let me begin with how it is designed:

CoGe’s architecture and philosophy: Solve a problem once

CoGe is a web-based platform for comparative genomics and consists of many interconnected web-based tools. The entire system is hooked up to a database that can store any version of any genome in any state of assembly from any organism (currently ~9000 genomes from ~8000 organisms). Each of CoGe’s tools is designed to do one task (e.g. search and display information about a genome, compare two genomes and generate syntenic dotplots, search any number of genomes for similar sequence, manage a list of genes, etc.), and are linked to one another. This means that there is no predefined analysis workflow. Instead, people can begin exploring a genome of interest, compare it to what they want, find something interesting, explore that, finding something else, explore that, etc.) People anywhere in the world can perform computationally intense analyses by clicking a few buttons on a web-page, and letting our servers crunch away on whatever genomes we have currently loaded in our system . Since each tool is web-based, links are used to move from tool to tool which creates an easy way to save an analysis for future work or to send to a colleague. This also has the benefit that as we develop new tools to solve a specific problem, we can generalize the solution, and plug it into CoGe’s database and connect it to its pre-existing tool set. Overall, this allows an easy way for us to expand CoGe’s functionality.

Today’s tip of the week introduces a new (to us) tool for genomic comparisons. We came across this tool reading a blog post at James and the Giant Corn (great blog) about a figure from his research proposal. See, there are reasons to read blogs :D. The tool he uses to create this figure and analysis is GeVo at CoGe which has several useful tools in addition to GeVo. In today’s tip of the week, we’ll take a quick look at James’ figure at GeVo and introduce CoGe. Check them out, they look like quite useful tools. (and while you’re at it, check out James’ blog. Tidbits like this and interesting discussions make it well worth it.)

At OpenHelix, we certainly appreciate DNA! So we wanted to join in the festivities on DNA Day–this year the party is April 25, just about a week from today.

DNA Day commemorates the completion* of the human genome sequencing project. Annually there are special events, teaching and learning opportunities, and sometimes cupcakes**.

We are going to have something to offer, but we aren’t telling what just yet. Be sure to come back on Friday April 25th to see what we have available here. In the meantime, you might enjoy hearing Francis Collins talk about DNA Day. Did you know there will be a national chat room on that day? Or you might consider signing on to the COGE board: the Community of Genetic Educators. There are other ways to get involved–I know the American Society of Human Genetics organizes around this as well.